How the groups behind ‘Penn Forward’ are shaping the University’s future

In September 2025, Penn President Larry Jameson unveiled his first major institutional initiative: a strategic framework designed to guide the University through a period of mounting pressure on higher education institutions. Five months later, the working groups behind the plan are translating that vision into action.

The framework — titled “Penn Forward” — established six working groups, which have submitted their recommendations to the plan’s steering committee ahead of a public release in “early 2026.” The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke with leaders at the helm of the groups about their progress and priorities for the future.

Each working group was designed to address a particular domain of University action: Undergraduate Education and Innovation, Graduate and Professional Training, Research Strategy and Financing, Global Opportunity and New Markets, Operational Transformation, and Access, Affordability, and Value. 

In a statement to the DP, Provost John Jackson Jr. — who served as a member of the Operational Transformation working group — wrote that the working group leaders were selected because they were “creative, inspiring University citizens and big thinkers.”

“It was not hard to fill these teams,” Jackson wrote to the DP. “Given the talent on our campus, what was hard was keeping these teams to a manageable size.”

Idea generation

College junior Veronica Baladi — a member of the Global Opportunity and New Markets working group — said the idea generation process “started out with something called ‘bad ideas.’”

“Everyone said an idea that they thought would be completely unrealistic or unfeasible,” she described, adding that these “bad” ideas helped make the groups an “open space.”

“We actually saw that many of the bad ideas proposed were not necessarily bad ideas whatsoever, and that was really a good starting point for discussion,” Baladi said.

Megan Ryerson — co-chair of the Global Opportunity and New Markets working group, as well as the department chair of transportation and of city and regional planning — told the DP that her group employed design thinking, an approach that centers the user experience.

According to Ryerson, Sarah Rottenberg — the executive director of the Integrated Product Design Program — led “numerous thought exercises” to help the group think “in constrained and unconstrained ways and learning to build on each other.”

Penn’s Vice Provost for Research David Meaney, told to the DP that consulting group McKinsey & Company helped structure meetings for the Research Strategy and Financing working group, which he co-chaired.

Meaney explained that McKinsey insisted on in-person meetings to generate ideas, and led the group through “structured ideation exercises.” Because the consulting firm had been helping multiple Penn Forward groups, Meaney said they “had their finger on the pulse” of other groups’ conversations as well.

Long-term development

Planning for the future were a central theme of discussions, according to the working group’s other co-chair Michael Ostap, who is a professor of physiology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine.

“When we were given this job by Larry Jameson, he basically said, ‘What’s the University going to look like in 10 years?’” Ostap said. “We shouldn’t be thinking about how we’re going to adapt in the next couple of months. How are we going to change how we do what we do at the University?”

The Research Strategy and Financing group consolidated around 150 ideas into “a smaller number of bigger ideas,” Meaney added. 

In his statement to the DP, Jackson noted that Penn Forward focused on “three horizons” — today, 10 years from now, and forever. Jackson mentioned the need to address “emergent opportunities and direct challenges today” while keeping “that long-term horizon in our sights always.”

According to College senior and former DP staffer Max Annunziata — a member of the Undergraduate Education and Innovation working group — the scope of Penn Forward was a chance to “think big” in a “super exciting” and “totally different” way.

“So much of the work that I’m typically leading is incremental change,” Annunziata said. “Penn Forward was an opportunity to really take a bird’s-eye view of what the University is doing about undergraduate education across all schools and departments.”

Diverse perspectives

Throughout the ideation process, Penn Forward members both applied their personal experiences and incorporated feedback from the community.

Jackson wrote that the working group members were “broadly representative” and “had their own institutional connections and campus communities.”

By leveraging these connections, members of the Global Opportunity and New Markets working group worked extensively with other organizations on campus, according to Ryerson.

“We started in the beginning of the process by engaging with constituencies where we needed to collect data and information,” Ryerson said. “We were always met with an enthusiastic ‘yes’ and often really thoughtful follow-ups.”

The working groups also collaborated with each other in “formal and informal ways” to allow the teams exchanged ideas.

Ostap said that there was a “range of views” in the Research Strategy and Financing group, in which those who “lead big organizations” had “very broad institutional perspectives,” while research trainees and assistant professors provided input from their peers and colleagues.

Annunziata and Baladi both highlighted how their involvement in the Student Committee on Undergraduate Education shaped the ideas that they brought to their working groups’ meetings.

“[SCUE]’s identity is really built around a focus on student opinion research — gathering data on what students want [and] what students need,” Annunziata said. “I think our perspective was totally valued, and I was able to bring that in.”

The Research Strategy and Financing working group also considered “over 100 different ideas” from the Penn community directly submitted through the plan's website, according to Meaney.

“It was interesting to see how the thoughts that were coming from the community at large were also resonating with some of the thoughts that we were bringing up in our own working group,” he added.

Shared values and goals

While each working group member brought their own views and backgrounds, the groups also coalesced around the “unifying goal” of wanting to “make an impact” at Penn, Ryerson said.

Baladi described a “willingness to be open and also to fail” as a tenet of the Global Opportunity and New Markets group’s process.

“Having more ideas is always so much better to choose from than having a very, very limited pool,” Baladi said.

The Research Strategy and Financing working group similarly focused on ideas that “a university really is uniquely positioned to solve,” according to Meaney.

“We wanted to ensure that we were staying within the mission of the University,” Ostap said. “When you’re talking about going after resources and funds, one can immediately go down a pathway of what’s best for a commercial entity, rather than what’s best for the University.”

Although Penn Forward members were unable to disclose specific findings to the DP due to the confidential nature of their recommendations, they identified broad areas their working groups sought to address.

Annunziata mentioned that interdisciplinarity and artificial intelligence were central topics discussed by the Undergraduate Education and Innovation working group.

Baladi referenced her prior SCUE work with the University’s Responsibility Center Management model, which states that each of Penn’s schools is responsible for managing its own funding stream. Her understanding of RCM “ended up being a very crucial point” and pivoted one of the ideas of the Global Opportunity and New Markets working group.

Ostap said that, in the Research Strategy and Financing working group, “there’s room for growth and new ideas” in domains ranging from “research strategy to administration to the teaching mission.” He additionally highlighted “clear decision pathways,” “principles for engagement,” “data governance issues,” and “academic freedom” as key considerations.

Committee members expressed excitement about the impact their initiatives could have on the University.

“I think there’s real promise that there could be really big and really positive shifts in what being an undergraduate at Penn might feel like,” Annunziata said.

“There’s no way to advance a place like Penn — with all its missions and all its moving parts — without broad community participation,” Jackson wrote to the DP. “As individual initiatives move forward, they are going to have to engage broadly to make sure proposed changes or new programs can actually work.”

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